Intel 2025 Workplace Report: Tips for Excelling in a New World

The Definition of Employee

Trend 1: The definition of "employee" is in flux, along with workers' expectations about how and when and where they work. Flexibility will be the key to it all, and the employees' ability to work where they want will be a greater negotiating point than salary. (Intel also commissioned an info graphic to illustrate the white paper's findings.)

Intel anticipates that by 2025, traveling will be made more complicated by a growing world population, urbanization trends and more people with cars, and ever-shrinking technology will become so small "it will be embedded in our clothes and environment," Intel Technology Strategist Tim Hansen wrote in a new white paper, "The Future of Knowledge Work." During a Dec. 14 Webcast to discuss the paper, Hansen, along with Intel Chief Evangelist Steve Brown, discussed five major trends distilled from Hansen's research. While he set out to consider how Intel should prepare for the future, he discovered ways that changing workforces and ever-present technology "dramatically fostered by cloud computing and massively expanded use of personal data" will impact the greater world—information helpful beyond Intel's walls. Companies that have a clear vision of these unfolding trends, wrote Hansen, will "have an unprecedented opportunity to excel in a dramatically different landscape."